Building a sneakier robot

If robots weren’t annoying enough already with their beeping and clanging and general lack of empathy, now two scientists from Georgia Tech are teaching them how to be liars too.

The experiment, published last week in The International Journal of Social Robotics, endeavored to see if two machines, Hider and Seeker, could psych each other out by leaving fake trails for one another. While we’re still a long way from a machine that’s sneaky enough to feign regret like HAL 9000, the research marks a significant step forward in the science of teaching artificial intelligence to use deception.

Three American astronomers specializing in dark energy were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics this week. Win Rosenfeld talks to Brian Greene about why dark energy has been a top priority for the astrophysics community in recent years.

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